This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. The news on that front has been chaotic — a draft executive order to close the department was leaked, then walked back by the Trump administration, and newly minted Education Secretary Linda McMahon has pledged to guide the department through its “final mission” without providing specifics on what that mission is or how it is final.
Then, on Tuesday, the department announced the firing of more than 1,300 workers, bringing the department staff to about half the size it was before Trump took office.
Amid the upheaval, one thing is clear: Any plan to shut down the Education Department — and, indeed, the cuts and layoffs that have already happened — will disproportionately hurt students with disabilities. That includes kids who receive special education, but also those in general education classrooms who get supports or accommodations to learn, from speech therapy to sign language interpreters to counseling. Any kid who has an Individualized Education Program (IEP) or 504 plan through their school could be affected by what’s going on at the Education Department.
That’s a huge group of kids. As of 2022–2023, 7.5 million students — 15 percent of all those enrolled in public school — received special education or related services (like speech therapy) under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. The most common reasons were specific learning disabilities like dyslexia.
I know a lot of students and families are concerned about what the Trump administration’s actions could mean for education. So to dig more specifically into some of these issues, I reached out to Sara Nović, whose work has helped me make sense of the administration’s impact on students and on disability rights more generally.
Nović is an author and translator, and she’s also the co-founder of Disability Rights Watch, a site that shares news about disability advocacy in the current moment. “As a deaf person and the mom of a deaf kid, I’ve always had a vested interest in disability rights and education,” she told me in an email. But her “villain origin story for broader organizing” happened in 2023, when she organized against an ACLU-Delaware complaint that could have harmed deaf children. “This was an example of an ill-informed group trying to ‘help,’ but being co-opted by special interests and not listening to actual deaf/disabled people and experts in the field,” she said.
The experience taught Nović a lot about organizing, lessons she’s now putting into practice on a nationwide scale as changes in the federal government potentially threaten access to learning for millions of kids. Today, Nović is a go-to source for what’s going on with the Trump administration’s education policy right now (a topic that’s often murky), and how it will affect kids’ lives. Our conversation — which I’ve condensed and amended with a few links — looks at how the Education Department enforces disability rights, what cuts there could mean, and how everyone can support students with disabilities right now.
Why is the Education Department’s work especially important for students with disabilities? How does the department help enforce their right to an education?
The Department of Education enforces a law called Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which gives disabled children a legal right to a “free and appropriate public education,” and oversees the creation of those students’ Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). A student’s right to specialized instruction, services like speech or physical therapy, or an out-of-district placement in programs like schools for the deaf or blind, are under the purview of IDEA.
The department also gives grants to school districts specifically for IDEA-related costs (not enough, but some), and disburses funds for a variety of special ed programming like early intervention programs, teacher training, the Special Olympics, the Helen Keller National Center for the DeafBlind, Gallaudet University, and National Technical Institute for the Deaf, and many more.
The Education Department has already seen layoffs and canceled contracts, as well as the stopping (and maybe restarting?) of the processing of disability rights cases through the Office of Civil Rights. Have these cuts, delays, and uncertainties already affected students with disabilities? How?
If a school violates IDEA, it’s not as if the police come and throw them in IDEA jail. Filing a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights is one of the main mechanisms for enforcement. (Same for the Americans With Disabilities Act enforcement.)
These wait times are already very long, and obviously if a child loses years of education waiting in line for OCR to get around to investigating, it is a loss no matter what the outcome.
One grant program we recently saw destroyed was for disabled students graduating high school and transitioning to the workforce. Due to the sudden nature of the cut, we’re likely to lose those programs.
And almost all of the Education Department’s research contracts were also canceled in February, including one that provides IDEA-related data analysis. IDEA grants are given out via a complex formula grant calculation, so without that data, districts’ funds could be delayed or never arrive in the coming year.
Trump has vowed to dismantle the Education Department, and while it’s not clear exactly what form that will take, it seems like the administration intends more layoffs and cuts at a minimum. What are your concerns about education for students with disabilities under this administration, and about the impacts of “dismantling” the department, whatever that looks like?
We stand to lose so much educational and advocacy expertise for disabled kids if the department goes down, whether that means full abolishment (which would require an act of congress) or an executive order and Secretary McMahon just taking an axe to the workforce and programming internally.
Disability is intersectional, so disabled students of color and other marginalized backgrounds are going to be disparately impacted by these cuts on top of all the other anti-DEI initiatives being pushed onto the department.
Funding is obviously a huge concern. Funding for national programs, research, teacher trainings, as well as grant funding sent out to local districts are all at risk. Title I schools who rely on the federal government for general and special ed funding will drown.
Even if there are districts out there who want to do right by their disabled students, if they are no longer receiving funding from the federal government eventually they will have to make decisions between providing individual services and keeping the lights on. This concern is compounded as the Right pushes voucher programs, because it will suck even more funding out of public schools, and private schools aren’t even required to accept disabled students, never mind accommodate them.
There are currently three active bills in congress that could dismantle the department. Right now, any of them getting the votes is unlikely, but they are worth looking at because you can see different potential trajectories for programs without the Education Department. One of the bills is a single sentence, with no mention of whether and how IDEA law would continue to be enforced. Another moves IDEA oversight to the Department of Health and Human Services, which is honestly to me more frightening, given the disdain RFK Jr. has for disabled and autistic folks, his love of eugenics, and recent spitballing over “wellness farms.”
Can you talk a little bit about what school might look like for kids without the supports they’re entitled to under IDEA? What happens to their learning?
It’s hard to generalize the impact of losing IDEA protections, because by their nature every kid’s IEP plan is designed especially for their needs. But as an example, a hard-of-hearing kid like mine has the legal right to things like visits from an educational audiologist who makes sure his hearing aids are working and has access to an FM system that connects to those, an ASL-fluent speech therapist who on English concepts and vocabulary, a teacher of the deaf who has specialized training and teaches a regular academic curriculum via ASL, and specialized instruction via a reading curriculum that’s designed especially for deaf and hard-of-hearing kids to bypass phonics.
Things like visual schedules, movement breaks, preferential seating, closed captions, extra time on tests and quizzes, or other accommodations are also in an IEP.
IDEA law was created in part as a backlash to the previous practice of institutionalizing disabled kids in horrid conditions, like at Willowbrook. Without IDEA, while we won’t immediately swing back to that place of mass institutionalization (though honestly, with the amount of eugenic rhetoric floating around in this administration, it can’t be ruled out), many of the effects will be the same — the student may be in the classroom, but they aren’t learning.
There’s another recent development a lot of disability rights advocates are concerned about: Texas v. Becerra, the lawsuit around Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. What could happen to education for students with disabilities if that suit is successful?
Section 504 is part of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that says any entity that receives federal funding may not discriminate on the basis of disability. The statute had a broad impact on disability rights, because it allows disabled people to enter and be accommodated in hospitals, public buildings, federal jobs, and public schools. A disabled kid even being able to enter the public school was not a given before 504.
Within a school context, folks might be familiar with “504 Plans,” which are legal protections for accommodations, including closed captions, sign language interpreters, FM systems, wheelchair accessibility, braille or audio texts, certain medical supports, as for students with diabetes or asthma, and anything that provides a disabled person access to regular school instruction.
Texas vs. Becerra is a lawsuit that has two parts — one asks the judge to dismantle Final Rule, a series of guidelines established by HHS in 2024 to bolster Section 504 protections. The other part asks the judge to fully declare Section 504 unconstitutional, and provide “relief” from enforcement. A lot of attorneys general have been saying they only want the first part, not the second part, but the request to declare 504 unconstitutional remains in the filing, right there in black and white.
Honestly, even if it were true that they only want to remove Final Rule, its something worth fighting for — those rules add pandemic-age protections for disabled people (e.g., you’re not allowed to deny someone a ventilator because they’re disabled) and update technological stipulations into the 21st century regarding telehealth and website accessibility. They also emphasize disabled people’s right to live in-community rather than be institutionalized; this section seems to be what causes the greatest angst among involved states.
There has been a lot of confusion about to what degree this is a suit about “gender dysphoria,” but this is simply an attempt by prosecutors to use transphobic rhetoric to cultivate buy-in for their ableism. However, even if it were, trans rights are disability rights, and I for one will not be throwing anyone’s basic protections under the bus in an attempt to delay the theft of my own. Our liberation is intertwined.
What should students with disabilities and their families know about their rights during this time? Are there resources you’d point to if folks are concerned, or just want more information?
It’s a truly scary time for families of disabled kids, because even if laws are not repealed, there is a question of to what degree they’re going to be enforced. There are also a lot of state-level, comply-in-advance attacks that seek to dismantle these protections locally that families need to be vigilant about. Besides Disability Rights Watch, I’d recommend these two educational policy trackers: Department of Education Tracker, and Fighting for My Voice’s Policy Change Tracker.
What can schools, educators, and communities do to support students with disabilities right now?
Share this information. Call representatives and ask them to protect the Department of Education, and sign on to Rep. Hayes’ Department of Education Protection Act. Call attorneys general and ask them to drop out of the lawsuit Texas v. Becerra. Advocate for codifying special education funds at the state and local levels. Make fliers and spread the word offline.
Tell disabled kids you see them as full human people worthy of education and a good quality of life with access to their communities. So often these days the harm brought on disabled people has been framed by the media as collateral damage in an attempt to get to the “real rights” of others. We are human. Stand with us, too.
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After I wrote about what childhood was like before the widespread availability of vaccines, reader Douglas McNeill responded with some of his own family history. “When I was about 20 years old,” McNeill wrote, “my father shared one fact: He and mother decided to have four children so ‘two might live.’ The 19th century childhood deaths you describe still echoed in hardscrabble West Virginia where he was raised in the 1930s.”
McNeill wrote that his sister was exposed to rubella when his mother contracted the disease while pregnant: “She lived with lifelong hearing loss because of that and was the second person in the US who had open heart surgery, the best available treatment in 1945.”
“When vaccines become available,” McNeill said, “I am first in line.”
And now a question for a future newsletter: Do the kids in your life have imaginary friends? What are they like, how do they play, and what function do you think they serve? Let me know at anna.north@vox.com.
